Review by Eric Hillis
Directed by: Bryan Fuller
Starring: Mads Mikkelsen, Sophie Sloan, Sigourney Weaver, David Dastmalchian
Hannibal showrunner Bryan Fuller reteams with that show's leading man Mads Mikkelsen for his feature film debut as writer/director of Dust Bunny. Fuller's movie sees Mikkelsen play a sullen hitman who lives a lonely life in a high-rise apartment until one day a little girl seeks his help when her parents are murdered. Wait, haven't we seen this movie before?
Yep, Fuller has rather brazenly lifted the plot of Luc Besson's Léon: The Professional. Not just Besson's plot, but many of his shot compositions. There are scenes here that are staged almost identically to those in Besson's film. Besson isn't the only Gallic influence here, with Fuller adopting the distinctive emerald and amber colour scheme of Jean-Pierre Jeunet, whose Amélie was a major influence on Fuller's TV series Pushing Daisies, and Isabella Summers' tango-esque score is clearly designed to evoke Gallic whimsy. This is a movie indebted to and in love with a certain type of turn of the century French pop-cinema, but aside from throwing a monster in the mix, it has no ideas of its own.
That monster lives under the bed of precocious eight-year-old Aurora (Sophie Sloan). Or at least she's convinced there's a monster under her bed, one that emerges whenever anyone walks on the floor of her family's apartment. When she wakes one morning to find her parents have disappeared, she fears they have been eaten by the monster. A hitman (Mikkelsen) just happens to live down the hall, and a few nights prior, Aurora witnessed him take out a bunch of goons in Chinatown. Stealing her local church's collection plate, Aurora hires the hitman (who is credited only as "Resident 5B") to kill her monster.
5B dismisses such a suggestion as the product of an overactive imagination. His more grounded theory is that Aurora's parents were killed in a case of mistaken identity, and that he was the real target. Reluctantly adopting Aurora as an apprentice, 5B sets about preparing for a confrontation with those out to get him, who he believes are lead by his handler Laverne (Sigourney Weaver).
Where Léon was set in a very recognisable New York, Dust Bunny plays out in a fantasy storybook city that falls somewhere between the London of Tim Burton's Sweeney Todd and the San Francisco Chinatown of John Carpenter's Big Trouble in Little China. Everything is heightened to 11, which means that from the off we have no doubts that there really is a monster under Aurora's bed. As such, many of the plot beats are redundant and the mystery is rendered void. Had the movie been presented against a more realistic backdrop, its fantasy elements would have had greater impact.
If you're allergic to quirk, you'll be breaking out in hives while watching Dust Bunny. Fuller adopts an approach of throwing a lot of shit at the wall to see what sticks. There are admittedly some genuinely clever ideas and inventive visuals. The shadow of a dragon in a Chinese parade convinces Aurora that she's watching 5B slay a real life monster. In a wonderful nod to an iconic shot of Sissy Spacek's pyjamas in Alan Rudolph's Welcome to LA, a rival assassin arrives to take out 5B clad in a flowery camouflage outfit designed to make him blend into the apartment's gauche wallpaper. You get the sense that Fuller has had a lot of images floating around in his head and has decided to let them all out in his feature debut, but some of his ideas are so kooky that they simply prove distracting, causing us to question their relevance. Why does a church choir lip sync to Sister Janet Mead's funky 1973 rendition of The Lord's Prayer? Why does Weaver perform a bizarre jaw unclenching exercise? Why is there a life-size bronze hippo in Aurora's apartment? Sometimes Fuller's kooky props distract from important scenes, like the lamp in the form of a chicken with a bulb in its ass that dominates the first meeting between 5B and Aurora.
At the heart of all this is a simple relationship between two unlikely friends, and Dust Bunny would have made better use of its resources in recognising that Mikkelsen and newcomer Sloan are its greatest assets. Cut through all the overly-garnished production design and you'll find some genuinely charming chemistry between the mismatched pair. It's a shame the script doesn't give these two actors much to chew on, with too many of their interactions built around cheap gags like a disagreement on how Aurora's name should be pronounced (a joke that's funny at first but ultimately run into the ground). The sort of French movies that Dust Bunny is so indebted to drew "style over substance" accusations from their detractors at the time. That was largely unfair on those films, but it's an accusation you couldn't argue against if levelled at Fuller's shiny but empty debut.
Dust Bunny is on UK/ROI VOD from January 16th.
